m, who it is hoped will prove a valuable
acquisition to the Society, to read us his maiden effort".

Laura rose to her feet and, trembling with nervousness, stuttered forth
her prose. The three little pages shot past like a flash; she had
barely stood up before she was obliged to sit down again, leaving her
hearers, who had only just re-adopted their listening attitudes, agape
with astonishment. She could have endured, with phlegm, the ridicule
this malheur earned her: what was harder to stomach was that her paper
heroics made utterly no impression. She suffered all the humiliation of
a flabby fiasco, and, till bedtime, shrank out of her friends' way.

"You were warned not to be too cocky, you know," Mary said judicially,
on seeing her downcast air.

"I didn't mean to be, really.--Then you don't think what I wrote was up
to much, M. P.?"

"Mm," said the elder girl, in a non-committal way.

Here Cupid chimed in. "Look here, Infant, I want to ask you something.
Have you ever been in Venice?"

"No."

"Ever seen a gondola?"

"No."

"Or the Doge's palace?--or a black-cloaked assassin?--or a masked lady?"

"You know I haven't," murmured Laura, humbled to the dust.

"And probably never will. Well then, why on earth try to write wooden,
second-hand rubbish like that?"

"Second-hand? ... But Cupid ... think of Scott! He couldn't have seen
half he told about?"

"My gracious!" ejaculated Cupid, and sat down and fanned herself with a
hairbrush. "You don't imagine you're a Scott, do you? Here, hold me, M.
P., I'm going to faint!"--and at Laura's quick and scarlet denial, she
added: "Well, why the unmentionable not use the eyes the Lord has given
you, and write about what's before them every day of your life?"

"Do you think that would be better?"

"I don't think--I know it would."

But Laura was not so easily convinced as all that.

Ever a talented imitator, she next tried her hand at an essay on an
abstract subject. This was a failure: you could not SEE things, when
you wrote about, say, "Beneficence"; and Laura's thinking was done
mainly in pictures. Matters were still worse when she tinkered at
Cupid's especial genre: her worthless little incident stared at her,
naked and scraggy, from the sheet; she had no wealth of words at her
disposal in which to deck it out. So, with a sigh, she turned back to
the advice Cupid had given her, and prepared to make a faithful
transcript of actuality. She called what she no